Are we humans going to make it?
Stanford ecologist Harold Mooney says yes.
Harold Mooney is a professor of Environmental Biology at Stanford University and co chair of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Abby Frank of Earth & Sky interviewed him shortly after the announcement of major findings of the Assessment, in early 2005.
Frank: What is the goal of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment?
Mooney: Well, the goal of the project is to first, to evaluate the status of the world’s ecosystems. And secondly, we wanted to evaluate the capacity of those ecosystems to deliver goods and services to society. We also wanted to see how the actions of humans were either enhancing or modifying or degrading these services, with the goal of designing a more sustainable future.
Frank: What were your findings?
Mooney: There were several main findings. The first one is that over the past 50 years, humans have modified ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than at any time in human history. So that’s a pretty dramatic finding in a way. And a lot of these changes have been not only substantial, but many of them are irreversible, for example, a loss of diversity on Earth.
So that’s the number one finding that big changes have happened. Of course they’ve been happening for a long time, but the rate of change has increased extensively…
For example, more land was converted to crop land since 1945 than in the 18th and 19th centuries combined. There have been major impacts on systems that are very important to humans for a number of reasons. One is coral reefs. Twenty–five percent of the world’s coral reefs have been badly degraded or destroyed. If you have been following the news, you know how important those systems were in protecting coast lines in the latest tsunami disaster…
Finding number two is that during this period, as we’ve been essentially mining Earth’s ecosystems for human good, we have had major advances in human well being. Food production has increased greatly and the price of food has dropped. The Gross Domestic Product has increased. Democracy has increased. A lot of things have gotten better, but these gains have been at considerable cost to natural systems.
I can just give you some examples of what we’ve lost. We looked at all of the “services” that ecosystems provide. By “services,” I mean those things that benefit humans. We organized those services into a number of categories.
One category is called “provisioning.” These are things that everyone is familiar with the things which are bought and sold in the marketplace like food, fiber, freshwater, and genetic resources. The status of many of those, at least the crops and livestock and aquaculture, has increased due to human activities.
But not all of them have increased. Our fisheries are collapsing, so that’s a provisioning service which humans have really modified extensively. We’ve been depleting our genetic resources in many ways, by monocrops for one. Ecosystems are declining in their ability to provide fresh water to society because of all the pollution and so forth. So, that’s one area we looked at.
But then looking at other kinds of services we call them “regulating” and “cultural.” Regulating services are things that people don’t think about very much the air quality, climate regulation, water quality, purification, erosion control, disease regulation, pollination services, pest regulation. All those services provided by ecosystems have declined in capacity because of modification of the systems that we have.
We called the third category “cultural” services. We evaluated all of these globally. These are spiritual and recreational values and aesthetic values; and those in general have also gone down in their quality. So, although we’re making great progress in human well–being, we’re mining a lot in order to provide those…
We’ve also been looking into the future and the future is that unless we do some major modifications, we will see these trends will continue. There are a lot of things that we can do, and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment talks about those. But there are going to have to be some major changes in the way we do business in order to modify these trends and make them more favorable to preserving the fundamental base from which society depends.
Frank: It seems as if the focus on ecosystem “services” represents a departure from traditional ideas about environmentalism and conservation. Is the health of an ecosystem now measured by the health of the humans that inhabit it?
Mooney: In our past assessments of the state of natural systems we didn’t consider how they related to society and what they meant to society. So, the service concept is really important because it links people to these concerns which have been remote in the past. If you say “well we’re losing biodiversity,” a lot of people say “well so what?” And I think we’re trying to get at the “so what” in terms of what it means to the people.
The other thing that we did which was innovative, that hasn’t been done before, is to be more explicit, not only about the services, but how these impact human well being and looking explicitly at individual services and individual components of human well being. So that is the innovation, I think, in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
Frank: So . . . are we gonna make it?
Mooney: Sure we’re gonna to make it! Absolutely! Absolutely! When you start adding up all of these things, it’s sort of a daunting future but at the same time we have all kinds of tools that we can utilize.
But we’re going to have to do some things differently. There are many things that came to our attention when we were doing this. One is that a lot of the institutions we have built up through the years are not really appropriate for the kinds of actions that are needed now. And, just to give you one example, in the United States we have a Department of Agriculture. We have an Environmental Protection Agency. We have agencies which deal with natural resources, like the Department of the Interior. We have a Commerce Department which deals with trade between nations. All these agencies are actually dealing with interlocking issues. In order to be effective with one, you’ve got to be considering the others. But they’re not considering that way. They are fortresses within themselves.
And so, we need new kinds of institutions which will look at these trade–offs. We spent a lot of time evaluating trade offs. That is, you can do one thing in an ecosystem to enhance one service. But you may be losing others. We need to do better at optimizing these trade–offs.
Consider the example of intensive agriculture, which has been very very important. It saves land for wildlife and provides economically cheap food. But we’ve suffered some downside trade offs of services there, too, because of nitrogen pollution and water use which was not always sustainable. So, I think we have to do intensive agriculture, but at the same time we have to look at the trade offs. And if we had agencies which were more interactive, that would help a lot I think.
There are all kinds of other things we need to do, and one of them that we really stress a lot is a better economic evaluation of goods and services. There are a lot of services which are not in the marketplace yet. But we’re proposing that they do become a greater part of the marketplace, while eliminating some of these subsidies which promote excessive use of ecosystem services.
So institutions, economics . . . and we’ve really got to work on the technology. We’ve got to work on how to restore ecosystems, how to bring them back. We’ve got to work on the social and behavioral dimension. You know, changes in consumption patterns and new education.
So we can do a lot and we have to do a lot, I think, in order to use all of the positive things that are happening and balance them out better with the negative so that we have a brighter future.
Frank: Thank you, Dr. Mooney.
